Years ago, one of the big publishing houses was bringing out titles that brought little attention when they came out. I remember discovering Weeds and savoring every bit of hardship a family endured on a Kentucky farm in the early twenties.

A friend of mine recommended another novel, Burning Marguerite. The novel published 2003 and never really took off.This from the book’s back cover: One winter morning James Hack Wright finds nine-four-year-old Marguerite Deo–the woman he has always known as “Tante”–lying dead in the woods outside his cabin, clad only in a flowered nightgown.

The book turns back and forth from the discovery of Marguerite’s body by the man she raised, to her own life, to the sheriff who is suspicious about her death, all couched in a quiet sense of loving.

Burning Marguerite is a wonder and should be read.